Over a decade ago I worked with a vendor who had a SOAP service where every method had a single parameter, and that parameter was a Base64-encoded XML document

Over a decade ago I worked with a vendor who had a SOAP service where every method had a single parameter, and that parameter was a Base64-encoded XML document containing the actual parameters. Just this year I was reviewing the web services documentation for a Fortune 500 company and realized that their SOAP offering was a transparently thin (like a soap bubble?) façade over a simpler "POST us some XML" API. Between these two experiences I have worked with more SOAP services than I can count, and I can't think of a single one where SOAP made anything easier.